1. Field of the Invention
The invention pertains to the field of data processing systems. More particularly, the invention pertains to systems and methods for providing information regarding changes in telephone numbers to the public over a global information network.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently, NTT (Nippon Telegraph And Telephone Corporation) provides a telephone number relocation guidance service. If the telephone number is changed and the user applies for a relocation guidance service with NTT, a voice guidance of the new telephone number corresponding to the previous one is announced when a caller calls the old telephone number.
The existing relocation guidance service is available only for the specified period since the old telephone number is reassigned to another user. If a caller calls the old telephone number after a specified period, the caller may hear an announcement that xe2x80x9cThis line is no longer in usexe2x80x9d or the caller may even call the new user, which creates a wrong number problem.
The relocation guidance service is only provided for land telephone circuits of NTT and is not available for mobile phone, PHS, and pagers which telephone numbers are changed more frequently. Since there are many operators of mobile phone and PHS, it is very difficult for one customer center to operate a telephone number relocation guidance server uniformly. In addition, it is impossible to cover international telephone numbers.
It is time consuming work to provide the telephone relocation guidance service because NTT has to enter both old telephone number and new telephone number in their database.
This invention corrects the inconveniences of the existing system. The objective of the invention focuses on unlimited availability of the telephone number relocation guidance service. It covers not only the land telephone circuit but also many other telephone terminals such as mobile phone, PHS, and pagers and provides several telephone relocation guidance services uniformly. The objective not only targeted toward domestic telephone number relocation but also international telephone number relocation guidance can be provided uniformly.
It will also be understood that although the invention is described in terms of the NTT, that it will also be applicable to other telephone and communications systems worldwide.
This invention is related to a telephone number relocation guidance system, which is related to all telephone number relocation information systems including mobile telephones both domestically and internationally. The telephone number reallocation guidance system of the invention consists of a server connecting with a terminal on the Internet. The terminal inputs information such as telephone number, and the server will then send information to the terminal such as the old telephone numbers and its corresponding new telephone number and the owner name of these telephone numbers. The information is stored in a database that stores multiple records. The server also has a processing unit that searches old telephone numbers input from the terminal and its corresponding new telephone number and owner name from the database and sends the searched information to the terminal. The display incorporates a Web (World Wide Web) browser.